08 November 2012

Moodle Research Conference

The first Moodle Research Conference was held in Crete in September
2012, organised by Moodle, CosyLlab and It Is Art Ltd. This is a
fantastic addition to the Moodlemoots with the potential to lead to
exciting new developments and sharing of lessons learned to improve
practice. The conference proceedings are here - http://research.moodle.net/MoodleCon_Proceedings_program/index.htm - and there is a plan for videos of presentations to be put on the website.
I
attended and presented a paper on "a community approach to staff
development in eLearning" that I co-wrote with Nicoletta Rata-Skudder.

The highlights for me:

Found out that all Moodle HQ developers are completing the MCC certificate, and this means they are also interacting with teachers on the course

Babelium
plugin - teacher adds a video, mutes out parts of the speaking, student
records their voice where required - but can be used for storyboarding
or question/answer as well as scripted conversations. Code available,
definitely testing this.

GLUE and GLUE-PS. Integrates other web 2 tools into
Moodle. e.g. Google docs, dabbleboard, doodle, mediawiki, ... you add
activity GLUE GDocs, set groups access like separate groups and upload
files - it makes the google doc available just to the right people!
There were other features, like pedagogical pattern collector but I
can't remember all the details now.

MOCLog - new visualisation
for log data to show processes and outcomes of learning and teaching,
gives anonymous data for privacy, you can view course and category
analytics. Runs using CRON and is incremental. User chooses category and
course(s), roles, report types, maps against an elearning model. You
see activity types view/update/delete/upload/write. You can assign
weightings and make your own maps. You can view in groups. There is a
visual display with pie chart, graph. Moodle HQ asked how they can
improve Moodle logging data to enable more tools like this. The code is
available in sourceforge if we want to test this out. CAREFUL - powerful
tool but lots of potential for misinterpretation of meaning of the
data.

MonSys - creates tutor reports around participation in
forums, sends alerts to tell if students not accessing over certain
number of days, used for quick identification of access difficulties and
helping those students. Tested on 600 students with 19 tutors in Brasil
(I think). Looked interesting.

ELIS - might be useful as bridge
between student management system and Moodle, but presentation time was
not long enough for the presenter to show all his content so would have
to look further to really understand how it would work. Has usersets,
class instances, class enrolment data (completion, grades, credits,
objectives), learning program, tracking, learning objectives (define
goals and associate with activities). Feed information in ELIS and use
for reporting, a Moodle 2 plugin. There is a dashboard in MyMoodle.

Other stuff presented at the conference

Tagging
project at Uni Canterbury - teacher tags resources/activities and
student can search by tags, very basic and would be more useful if
students were tagging resources/activities.

PBL tool developed
to give students access to resources in international repositories in a
pedagogically sound way, uses scales of confidence to search resources
appropriate to learner, learner tags and feedback refines searches for
future users - tool in its infancy but will be useful in time.

Case study in West Australia - University and Secondary schools, course IHSO8801 Integrated Human Studies (overview here http://learning.ewfi.org/moodle20/mod/page/view.php?id=2326
) - they used Moodle, Skype to build relationships, had VC 2 hours per
week w/ LMS facilitating in between, not clear what the outcomes were
from his presentation.

Some volunteers somehow related to a
Church in Greece developed online teacher training courses, subjects -
web 2 tools, podcasting, blogs, innovative teaching. They use ADDIE
model and talked about LT model (learning together), STAD (not defined
in the presentation). There is a vision of a new school (not sure what
that means) and new curricula. There is a Greek School Network which is a
free service (Moodle 1.7 currently). These volunteers used Wiziq for
synchronous video conferencing, and made SCORM packages with eXe and
Articulate. They said they were online ALL THE TIME. There is apparently
no teacher registration or certification in Greece.

Categorisation
of learning design courses in virtual environments - looked for usage
patterns and basically they found most use of Moodle was "repository".

Israel
Math / Science / Technology courses for school students, have an
outdoor science garden (very cool), they asked children what they
wanted, found all the kids had laptops, smartphones, tablets, TVs in
their rooms, some schools 1 to 1 laptops, good school has 5 to 1 and bad
school has 10 to 1, teachers not sure how to use technology so they
help, lots of interactive stuff with kids talking to researchers and
asking questions, using Moodle and Elluminate, treasure hunts and fun
activities and competitions, reducing fear of maths. They building
inquiry skills, exploration, argument skills. If we could teach Hebrew
in NZ schools then this would be awesome.

Innovation in flexible
and collaborative learning. The story of moving from 1.9 to 2 they
increased emphasis on images, selected rotating theme images based on
pedagogy (adults, different ethnicities, collaboration), new icons like
coffee corner for forum, completion criteria made obvious, tech advice
icon, more personalisation emphasised with my files area and my
portfolio made prominent. They made programme themes of different
colours. 5 lessons learned - planning, research, specs and testing,
managing change, outcomes and evaluation.

Question - do Moodle
analytics have a role in learning design, feedback and assessment?
Discussed the London Pedagogy Planner project, use of tool not obvious
by design, need to teach how to use tool properly, look at activity
patterns, connectivity patterns, and learning design. The researchers
were asking the audience for answers and ideas for their question.

Islamic
environment - first experiment with GIRLS in the classroom. Boys on
main floor and girls sit behind screen in balcony area. Some teachers
allowed for verbal discussion between girls and boys in the classroom.
NO online discussion was allowed between girls and boys in Moodle so a
new system wide Moodle role was created for girls. The results strongly
suggest girls should be there.

Moodle front end for Greek
language learning - they had a problem with student engagement, they
made teams (content, pedagogy, graphics, technology) who worked together
on tasks (created notebook, glossary... other stuff), embedded
questions and gave animated feedback for every event. They wanted
enriched resources, drag and drop, lots of iframes and flash. Target was
5 year olds through to higher education.

Improving Math -
problem was students decreasing math competence prior to starting study,
objective to improve 3 months to 1 month before study started. Made
plugins that showed personal feedback in graph, put thumbs up / down
next to each topic (quite cute actually), used book module with
formulas.

There are plans for research.moodle.net
that I think we should keep an eye on too, and contribute to. The
current thinking is that this becomes the hub for sharing research
plans, progress and outcomes, and that these feed into the direction of
Moodle core, the design of Modules and Plugins, and the conversations
around the future.
Some interesting blog posts related to the Moodle Research Conference: